A Daughter of the Snows eBook

inherited it, and through it all there ran an eternal
equity. To be honest was to be strong.
To sin was to weaken. To bluff an honest man
was to be dishonest. To bluff a bluffer was to
smite with the steel of justice. The primitive
strength was in the arm; the modern strength in the
brain. Though it had shifted ground, the struggle
was the same old struggle. As of old time, men
still fought for the mastery of the earth and the
delights thereof. But the sword had given way
to the ledger; the mail-clad baron to the soft-garbed
industrial lord, and the centre of imperial political
power to the seat of commercial exchanges. The
modern will had destroyed the ancient brute.
The stubborn earth yielded only to force. Brain
was greater than body. The man with the brain
could best conquer things primitive.

He did not have much education as education goes.
To the three R’s his mother taught him by camp-fire
and candle-light, he had added a somewhat miscellaneous
book-knowledge; but he was not burdened with what
he had gathered. Yet he read the facts of life
understandingly, and the sobriety which comes of the
soil was his, and the clear earth-vision.

And so it came about that Jacob Welse crossed over
the Chilcoot in an early day, and disappeared into
the vast unknown. A year later he emerged at
the Russian missions clustered about the mouth of the
Yukon on Bering Sea. He had journeyed down a
river three thousand miles long, he had seen things,
and dreamed a great dream. But he held his tongue
and went to work, and one day the defiant whistle of
a crazy stern-wheel tub saluted the midnight sun on
the dank river-stretch by Fort o’ Yukon.
It was a magnificent adventure. How he achieved
it only Jacob Welse can tell; but with the impossible
to begin with, plus the impossible, he added steamer
to steamer and heaped enterprise upon enterprise.
Along many a thousand miles of river and tributary
he built trading-posts and warehouses. He forced
the white man’s axe into the hands of the aborigines,
and in every village and between the villages rose
the cords of four-foot firewood for his boilers.
On an island in Bering Sea, where the river and the
ocean meet, he established a great distributing station,
and on the North Pacific he put big ocean steamships;
while in his offices in Seattle and San Francisco
it took clerks by the score to keep the order and system
of his business.

Men drifted into the land. Hitherto famine had
driven them out, but Jacob Welse was there now, and
his grub-stores; so they wintered in the frost and
groped in the frozen muck for gold. He encouraged
them, grub-staked them, carried them on the books
of the company. His steamers dragged them up
the Koyokuk in the old days of Arctic City. Wherever
pay was struck he built a warehouse and a store.
The town followed. He explored; he speculated;
he developed. Tireless, indomitable, with the
steel-glitter in his dark eyes, he was everywhere